Congressional lawmakers should conduct greater oversight into the development...
Congressional lawmakers should conduct greater oversight into the development of the FCC’s cost model for Phase II of the Connect America Fund (CAF), American Cable Association representative Patricia Jo Boyers planned to tell members of the Senate Communications Subcommittee. Boyers,…
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president of Boycom Cablevision, is to testify before the subcommittee at Tuesday’s 10:30 a.m. hearing on rural communications, in room 253 Russell. “It is critical that the FCC gets the model right,” her prepared testimony said. “Otherwise, the American consumer could be paying in excess of hundreds of millions of dollars per year for something but getting nothing in return.” CAF should be distributed efficiently and in areas where providers don’t offer broadband services, she is prepared to say. The government should not “subsidize competitors to build their networks in areas where our companies already provide broadband,” her testimony says. Instead, federal broadband dollars should be distributed “efficiently” and “targeted to only areas that lack an unsubsidized broadband provider.” Boyers planned to urge lawmakers to make it easier for cable operators to participate in the FCC’s planned reverse auctions to provide broadband in certain rural areas. Congress must also seek to address what she said was a lack of middle-mile infrastructure and rising middle-mile costs; outdated pole access attachment regulations and challenges to obtaining public and private rights-of-way for broadband deployment, the testimony says.